Workforce Management Needs Managing

By Larry Dawson, vice-president, marketing Accu-Time Systems

Catch up on Part 1.

Until a few years ago when a company was ready to progress from paper-based time sheets to an automated system the only practical option was a fixed, wall-mounted punch clock. Today, there are dozens of options available to replace paper-based systems. Those include digital and electro-mechanical punch clocks, smartphone applications, texting, tablets, point-of-sale systems, telephony, PC- and SaaS-based applications, battery-powered field time clocks, and biometric devices. Choosing only one of these systems to deploy is quite manageable. However, many organizations use a mixture of these time data collection methods and that technology blend creates complexity.

To manage that complexity and workforce management (WFM) in general, some companies have created the role of a workforce asset management (WAM) professional. According to workforce management technology expert, Lisa Disselkamp, editor of Workforce Asset Management Book of Knowledge (Wiley, 2013), WAM is the “convergence of four areas of management: human resources, operations, finance, and information technology.” (p. xi) With so much data streaming in from such a variety of collection devices it is critical that organizations manage it efficiently and maximize potential data mining opportunities. Those opportunities include improved efficiency in employee scheduling, assigning the right employees to the right jobs, better regulatory compliance, and deploying the right technologies that are most appropriate for the workforce.

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